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PennSound: All the Free Poetry You Care to Download

January 5, 2005

PHILADELPHIA - The recording industry may not want anyone downloading music without paying
for it, but a new project at the University of Pennsylvania
encourages downloading right to MP3 players and hard drives all the poetry a listener might want.
And it's all free for the asking.

PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound),
launched January 1, 2005, is a Web-based archive for noncommercial distribution of the largest
collection of poetry sound files on the Internet. PennSound offers a large variety of digital
recordings of poems -- currently 1,500 and fast growing -- mostly as song-length singles.

"This has never been done before," said Al
Filreis, PennSound co-director, English professor and director of Penn's
Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. "Most of the electronic
sound files available to the public are of entire poetry recordings, 30 or more minutes long,
with no tracking of individual cuts or poems. By right-clicking a PennSound link, a user can
save a single poem and listen to it as a high-quality MP3 file. We believe philosophically
that, since there is no significant profit to be gained by the sale of recorded poetry -- unlike
music -- many, many more poets will continue to grant us permission to use their work." As part
of the PennSound project, the Annenberg Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Penn is developing
a sophisticated cataloguing tool for the poetry sound files, enabling other libraries to collect
the material and enabling teachers to add the MP3s to their online syllabi. The poetry sound
files are retrievable both from a library catalog by authors' names and via Web search engines.
PennSound combines aspects of a library archive and a Web music-download site. Basic
bibliographic information is incorporated in each file so that a user downloads not only the sound
but also key facts about the recording, including author, title, place and date of the recording,
series, as well as copyright information.

"PennSound is as much about preservation as distribution," said Charles Bernstein, English
professor who, with Filreis, co-founded and co-directs the project. "Most poetry sound recordings
are at risk of deteriorating if not converted or copied. The beauty of PennSound is that in the
course of preserving these recordings, we are also making available a treasure trove of wonderful
poetry performances that we believe will attract a whole new generation to poetry as a performance
art."

PennSound is an ongoing project for producing and archiving new audio recordings from Penn and
around the world, as well as preserving existing audio archives. The site provides as much
documentation about individual recordings as possible with new files and new bibliographic
information to be added.